Introduction: Strange Multiplicities

In this chapter I introduce the central concepts of Romanticism and the Contingent Self. A key problematic in Romantic literature is the ‘challenge of representation’. Romantic writers inherited a difficult new concept of the self from eighteenth-century philosophy. The self was a mind, a subject, as distinct from the objects that surround us in ordinary life. When writers attempted to represent this self in writing, they faced a twofold challenge: (1) To represent the self in literature, some object would have to be found as its representative. How could a subject become an object? (2) Many writers doubted that the self was coherent. If the self was not a whole or a unity, then how could a single object represent it? In this chapter, I sketch a theory of the contingent self that can help us understand how Romantic writers rose to the challenge of representation. In Sect. 1.1 I lay out the methodology for the study, explaining how I propose to use digital methods to study the linguistic representation of the self. I provide a Romantic justification for this approach through a reading of Jeremy Bentham’s theory of language. In Sect. 1.2 I survey existing research on Romantic selfhood. Historically, scholars of Romanticism have focussed on the ‘necessary self’, the self that can guarantee its existence and find an adequate representation. Increasingly, scholars are interested in the Romanticism of the ‘contingent self’, the self that may not exist, and cannot strictly be ‘represented’. In Sect. 1.3, I set out an alternative theory of the Romantic self through a reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). To understand the contingent self in Romanticism, three distinctions are required: (1) the distinction between the subjective I and objective me; (2) the distinction between sensation, passion and the will, the three kinds of object Romantic writers used to fashion representations of the self; and (3) the distinction between monstrosity and multiplicity, two alternatives to ‘representation’ embraced by Romantic writers. Romantic writers were themselves aware of the challenge of representation, and their works often draw attention to the inadequacy of language for portraying the contingent self. Using digital methods, it is possible to observe the linguistic patterns that Romantic writers wove into their works to evoke the unrepresentable contingent self.